Benefits of Binge Eating

When I think of my years spent binge eating, I don’t think “What a waste” because binge eating served many useful purposes for me at a time when I needed it and didn’t feel I had anything else to help me.  This was decades ago, however it’s still a very real and valid explanation that might help you if you’re struggling to understand why we do what we do.

Binge eating fills a void in our lives – if we don’t have the social connection we yearn for, we have bingeing, if we don’t have a good friend close by to spend time with, bingeing is always there for us, if we feel unable to cope with the pressures of life, bingeing is the back door out of the struggle we currently find ourselves in.

And just like a drug, binge eating works to anaesthetise our feelings, it dulls our emotional pain – when everything gets too much – bingeing provides an answer, however temporary that is.

One of the major costs of binge eating is that we become further and further disconnected from our authentic selves, we reach an expert-level at disregarding ourselves as a living, breathing, human being and we become unsure about who we truly are inside.

At the end of the day, all I knew in my binge eating years was that I was very unhappy but I didn’t know why.  I would tell myself the reason I was so unhappy was because I was now x kilos overweight and I focused so much attention on my weight and body shape that I made myself believe this was The Problem and nothing else mattered.

We humans do have addictive personalities and I could have easily inhabited the life of any other addiction or compulsion, but I chose food.  While we’re busy feeding our habit, we don’t really have time for anything else outside our closely monitored routines.  Addictions trigger compulsions and compulsions trigger addictions, so for example I might overeat compulsively, then I might feel another compulsion to “get rid of the food” and indulge in a bulimic episode, then after that, I would feel a strong pull to dive into my addictive cleansing and purifying rituals that included the next crazy restrictive diet with the compulsory excessive exercise thrown in for good measure.

Binge eating provides us with an effective (although unsustainable) coping mechanism.  Back in the day, as soon as I felt the slightest twinge of an uncomfortable feeling coming on, I would sprint to the fridge and throw food in my mouth to dull the pain.  Many times, I would eat directly out of the fridge, while standing up with the fridge door open, no plate, no cutlery, no sitting down and certainly no real tasting or savouring of the food I was consuming.

The idea was to get the food in my mouth quickly and don’t stop until those intense feelings had subsided with the sedating effect that only a good carb-heavy binge could provide.

As you can see, our binge eating helps to keep us “protected” from feelings that our minds have already decided would be “too painful” to deal with.  Unfortunately, we won’t get to have the exposure to the feelings we think we can’t handle.

Be prepared for that one special day out of the blue when you feel courageous enough to test the waters and give yourself “permission” to not binge (despite your intense feelings) and see how that feels.

I can tell you from personal experience, the first time I chose to not binge, I felt like I had climbed Mt Everest, such was the feeling that I had conquered some enormous thing. 

And if we can do it once, we can do it one more time too.

We have inside of us the courage to explore what it would feel like to feel our feelings and choose to not binge.

It’s quite magical!  And we actually do have a choice, the more often we practise “just dealing with it” (our feelings), the better we get at it, the easier it feels, the more competent and confident we will feel in our own bodies.

How good would that feel for you?